Employees speak up, but not on antitrust
OAKLAND, CALIF. » Google employees are not shy about speaking up. In the past few years, they have confronted the company openly about building a censored search engine in China, the handling of sexual harassment claims and its work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence technology for weapons.
But there is one subject that employees avoid at all costs: antitrust.
They don’t address it in emails. They don’t bring it up in big company meetings. They are regularly reminded that Google doesn’t “crush,” “kill,” “hurt” or “block” the competition. And if you hope to land an executive job at the internet company, do not bring up the A- word in the interview process.
As the U. S. Justice Department, a coalition of state attorneys general and a congressional subcommittee have investigated Google for monopoly behavior during the past year, there has been little discussion internally about antitrust concerns. Now, as the department prepares to file a lawsuit against the company, the usual forums where Google employees debate anything and everything have been startlingly subdued about what may be an existential threat.
That’s because Google’s leaders have made it clear that antitrust is not a topic to be trifled with.
In compliance courses, employees of the Silicon Valley giant are taught what to say about it and how to say it.
The legal department is looped into even innocuous emails to apply “attorney- client privilege,” another layer of protection from prying regulators.
And although there is no written policy banning discussion of antitrust, a former executive recalled “coming down like a ton of bricks” on an employee who wrote flippantly about antitrust concerns.
The caution is not limited to employees. After Google interviewed a candidate for an executive job last year, that person sent a follow- up email to Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive. In the email, the candidate asked about the antitrust implications of a potential merger, according to two people familiar with the incident. An antitrust question to Pichai was seen as inappropriate, raising questions about the candidate’s judgment, the people said. While it did not disqualify the candidate, it was seen as a negative for their job prospects.
All of this has contributed to an unspoken understanding among Google employees that it is not wise to address the antitrust issues openly, said six current and former employees, who declined to be identified because they were either not permitted to talk publicly or feared retaliation.
“It’s seen as something you don’t talk about because there is no productive conversation associating Google with the word ‘ monopoly,’ ” said Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist who left the company in 2018 and now works at a tech ethics nonprofit. “The reality is that Googlers are paid well, and that’s because of the monopoly. In effect, the monopoly is on their side.”
Julie Tarallo McAlister, a Google spokeswoman, said the company has “standard competition law compliance trainings like most big companies. We ask our employees to compete fairly and build great products, rather than focus or opine on competitors.”
Some employees said the caution around antitrust is a byproduct of Google spending most of the last decade fighting antitrust cases around the world. They said a two- year investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, which ultimately decided in 2013 to not bring a case against Google, was the turning point that made the company more aware of regulatory risk.
Google is now extremely careful about what it puts in emails and company documents, and considers the antitrust implications of its business deals and strategy. One former executive said that after the FTC started its investigation, the company determined that acquisitions to bolster its dominant search business, such as its 2010 purchase of ITA Software, a flight information company, were now off the table.
Google said that based on its internal data, employees were not interested in antitrust issues and did not raise it at company events.
Yet the company still takes steps to be extra careful. All employees are required to take an annual online training course about how to communicate in a way to avoid legal issues with regulators. In the training, which was reported on earlier by The Markup, employees are told to assume that every document and email will end up in the hands of regulators, so they should refrain from using certain words or phrases.
“We are not out to ‘ crush,’ ‘ kill,’ ‘ hurt,’ ‘ block,’ or do anything else that might be perceived as evil or unfair,” according to a slide used in the training, which was reviewed by The New York Times.